Extraction of Ocean Wave Spectra From Simulated Noisy Bistatic High-Frequency Radar Data

Abstract

An algorithm is developed for the inversion of bistatic high-frequency (HF) radar sea echo to give the nondirectional wave spectrum. The bistatic HF radar second-order cross section of patch scattering, consisting of a combination of four Fredholm-type integral equations, contains a nonlinear product of ocean wave directional spectrum factors. The energy inside the first-order cross section is used to normalize this integrand. The unknown ocean wave spectrum is represented by a truncated Fourier series. The integral equation is then converted to a matrix equation and a singular value decomposition (SVD) method is invoked to pseudoinvert the kernel matrix. The new algorithm is verified with simulated radar Doppler spectrum for varying water depths, wind velocities, and radar operating frequencies. To make the simulation more realistic, zero-mean Gaussian noise from external sources is also taken into account